Rand Paul Detained

Rand Paul Detained, Kentucky’s junior senator, Republican Rand Paul, was detained at the Nashville airport this morning by agents of the Transportation Safety Administration, and it was all over the news. Many were describing it as a show-down between a libertarian senator and the Obama police state.

He was on his way back to the nation’s capital when a scanner set off an alarm and Paul declined to allow a security officer to subsequently pat him down. Local police escorted the senator away, but he was allowed to board a later flight. The security scanner was somehow set off by Paul’s knee, although Paul said he has no screws or medical hardware around the joint.

Senator Paul rolled up his pants leg and showed the TSA agents that he wasn’t carrying anything in his trousers, and asked for another scan. The agents refused to allow him to go through the scanner a second time, and demanded the senator submit to a manual body search. Sen. Paul refused. “There is no problem. It was just a problem with their machine. But this is getting more frequent, and because everybody has to have a pat down it’s a problem,” Paul said.

The senator told the Bowling Green Daily News that he was “detained” in a small cubicle and couldn’t make his flight to Washington for a Senate vote scheduled later in the day. Paul said the situation reflects his long-standing concern that the TSA shouldn’t be “spending so much time with people who wouldn’t attack us.”

Paul went through a millimeter wave machine that uses a generic outline of a body for all passengers, according to a TSA official who spoke to the Bowling Green Daily News on condition of anonymity to discuss agency screening procedures. When an alarm goes off, TSA officers target the area of the body that triggered the alarm and pat down the passenger.